Another from the Understanding in Time reading list by Don Steehler. This is reposted from the EDGE.

How to get Rich

Jared Diamond

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, I asked why history has unfolded differently over the last 13,000 years in Eurasia, in the Americas, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Aboriginal Australia, with the result that within the last 500 years Europeans were the ones who conquered Native Americans and Aboriginal Australians and sub-Saharan Africans, rather than vice versa.

Most of that book, was concerned with comparing the peoples of different continents, but I knew that I couldn’t publish a book comparing the histories of different continents and considering Eurasia as a unit without saying something about the fascinating problem of the differences of history within Eurasia. Why, within Eurasia, was it Europeans who conquered the world and colonized other people, rather than the Chinese or the people of India or the Middle East? I devoted seven pages to that subject at the end of Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I think I arrived at the correct solution. Nevertheless, since the publication of Guns, Germs, and Steel, I’ve received a lot of feedback, and the most interesting feedback has been about the implications of that comparative analysis of the histories of China, Europe, India, and the Middle East.

In particular, in addition to the review of my book by Bill Gates, I’ve received a lot of correspondence from economists and business people, who pointed out to me possible parallels between the histories of entire human societies and histories of smaller groups. This correspondence from economists and business people has to do with the following big question: what is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation, and wealth? Should your human group have a centralized direction, in the extreme having a dictator, or should there be diffuse or even anarchical organization? Should your collection of people be organized into a single group, or broken off into a number of groups, or broken off into a lot of groups? Should you maintain open communication between your groups, or erect walls between them, with groups working more secretly? Should you erect protectionist tariff walls against the outside, or should you expose your business or government to free competition?

These questions about group organization arise at many different levels and for many types of groups. They arise, of course, about the organization of entire governments or countries: what is the best way to govern a country? Remember the classic arguments about whether the best government is a benign dictatorship, or a federal system, or an anarchical free-for-all. The same questions also rise about the organization of different companies within the same industry. How can you account for the fact that Microsoft has been so successful recently, and that IBM, which was formerly successful, fell behind but then drastically changed its organization over the last four years and improved its success? How can we explain the different successes of what we call different industrial belts? When I was a boy growing up in Boston, Route 128, the industrial belt around Boston, led the industrial world in scientific creativity and imagination. But Route 128 has fallen behind, and now Silicon Valley is the center of innovation. And the relations of businesses to each other in Silicon Valley and Route 128 are very different, possibly resulting in those different outcomes.

Of course there are also the famous differences between the productivities of the economies of different countries: the differing national average productivities of Japan and the United States and France and Germany. Actually, though, there are differences between the productivities and wealths of different business sectors within the same country. For example, the German metal-working industry has a productivity rivaling that of the United States, so the Germans are certainly capable of organizing industries well, but the German beer-brewing industry is less than half as productive as the American beer-brewing industry. Or take Japan – we Americans are paranoid about the supposed efficiency of Japanese business, and the fact is that the Japanese steel industry is 45% more productive than the American steel industry. Why is it, then, that the Japanese food-producing industry is less than 1/3 as productive and efficient as the American food-processing industry? Still another example: in Korea, the steel industry is equal in efficiency to American steel making, but all other Korean industries lag behind the United States. What is it about the different organization of the German beer brewers and the German metal workers, or the different organization of the Japanese food processors and the Japanese car manufacturers, that accounts for the different productivities of these sectors within a given country?

Obviously, the answers to these questions about the different success of organizations partly depend upon idiosyncracies of individuals. The success of Microsoft must have something to do with Bill Gates. If an idiot were in command of Microsoft, then however superior Microsoft’s organization, Microsoft would be unlikely to be a successful business. But nevertheless one can still ask , all other things being equal, or else in the long run, or else on the average, what form of organization of human groups is best? I’m sure that there are many of you here who are involved with businesses that would like to know the answer to that question.

I propose to try to learn from human history. Human history over the last 13,000 years comprises tens of thousands of different experiments. Each human society represents a different natural experiment in organizing human groups. Human societies have been organized very differently, and the outcomes have been very different. Some societies have been much more productive and innovative than others. What can we learn from these natural experiments of history that will help us all get rich? I propose to go over two batches of natural experiments that will give you insights into how to get rich.

The first batch of natural experiments concerns understanding the effects of isolation and of group size and of communication with other groups on the productivity of human societies. Let’s learn from the extreme examples of isolation of human societies. If isolation has any effect on human societies, the places we’re most likely to see that effect are the histories of those two islands off southeastern Australia called Tasmania and Flinders Island. They lie about 200 miles off the southeast coast of Australia and are separated today from Australia by Bass Straits, but those straits are relatively shallow, so their floor lay above sea level at glacial times of low sea level up to about 10,000 years ago. The Bass Straits between Tasmania and Australia were then dry land, and Tasmania was part of the Australian mainland, just as Britain used to be part of the European mainland. When the glaciers melted, sea level rose and cut off Tasmania from the Australian mainland. So when Tasmania and Flinders were part of the Australian mainland, Australian Aborigines walked down to Tasmania and Flinders from the mainland.

And then 10,000 years ago the glaciers melted, sea level rose, and Tasmania became cut off from mainland Australia by Bass Straits, which are really rough waters. In addition, the watercraft of the Tasmanians were wash-through rafts that got waterlogged and sank after about a dozen hours. The result was that the boats of the Tasmanians could not reach Australia, and the boats of the mainland Aboriginal Australians could not reach Tasmania.

Thus, for the last 10,000 years the Tasmanians represented a study of isolation unprecedented in human history except in science fiction novels. Here were 4,000 Aboriginal Australians cut off on an island, and they remained totally cut off from any other people in the world until the year 1642, when Europeans “discovered” Tasmania. What happened during those 10,000 years to that isolated 4,000-person society? And what about nearby Flinders Island, which originally supported a population of 200 cut-off Aboriginal Australians? – what happened to that tiny isolated society of 200 people during those 10,000 years?

When Europeans discovered Tasmania in the 17th century, it had technologically the simplest, most “primitive” human society of any society in the modern world. Native Tasmanians could not light a fire from scratch, they did not have bone tools, they did not have multi-piece stone tools, they did not have axes with handles, they did not have spear-throwers, they did not have boomerangs, and they did not even know how to fish. What accounts for this extreme simplicity of Tasmania society? Part of the explanation is that during the 10,000 years of isolation, the Aboriginal Australians, who numbered about 250,000, were inventing things that the isolated 4,000 Tasmanians were not inventing, such as boomerangs. Incredibly, though, archeological investigations have shown one other thing: during those 10,000 years of isolation, the Tasmanians actually lost some technologies that they had carried from the Australian mainland to Tasmania. Notably, the Tasmanians arrived in Tasmania with bone tools, and bone tools disappear from archeological record about 3,000 years ago. That’s incredible, because with bone tools you can have needles, and with needles you can have warm clothing. Tasmania is at the latitude of Vladivostok and Chicago: it’s snowy in the winter, and yet the Tasmanians went about either naked or just with a cape thrown over the shoulder.

How do we account for these cultural losses and non-inventions of Tasmanian society? Flinders Island was even more extreme – that tiny society of 200 people on Flinders Island went extinct several millenia ago. Evidently, there is something about a small, totally isolated human society that causes either very slow innovation or else actual loss of existing inventions. That result applies not just to Tasmania and Flinders, but to other very isolated human societies. There are other examples. The Torres Strait islanders between Australia and New Guinea abandoned canoes. Most Polynesian societies lost bows and arrows, and lost pottery. The Polar Eskimos lost the kayak, Dorset Eskimos lost dogs and bow drills, and Japan lost guns.

To understand these losses in extreme isolation, the easiest case to understand is Japan, because the loss of firearms in Japan was witnessed and described. It took place in a literate society. Guns arrived in Japan around 1543 with two Portuguese adventurers who stepped ashore, pulled out a gun, and shot a duck on the wings. A Japanese nobleman happened to be there, was very impressed, bought these two guns for $10,000, and had his sword-maker imitate them. Within a decade, Japan had more guns per capita than any other country in the world, and by the year 1600 Japan had the best guns of any country in the world. And then, over the course of the next century, Japan gradually abandoned guns.

What happened was that the Samurai, the warrior class in Japan, had been used to fighting by standing up in front of their armies and making a graceful speech, the other opposing Samurai made an answering graceful speech, and then they had one-on-one combat. The Samurai discovered that the peasants with their guns would shoot the Samurai while the Samurai were making their graceful speeches. So the Samurai realized that guns were a danger because they were such an equalizer. The Samurai first restricted the licensing of gun factories to a hundred factories, and then they licensed fewer factories, and then they said that only three factories could repair guns, and then they said that those three factories could make only a hundred guns a year, then ten guns a year, then three guns a year, until by the 1840s when Commodore Perry came to Japan, Japan no longer had any guns. That represents the loss of a very powerful technology.

This loss was possible only in Japan because of its isolation; there were no other neighbors threatening Japan. When firearms arrived in Europe, there were European princes who similarly banned firearms, and there were European princes who banned printing, but you can guess what happened. When a prince in the middle of Europe banned firearms, within a short time the prince next door who did not ban firearms either walked in and conquered, or else the prince who banned firearms quickly realized his or her mistake and reacquired firearms from next door. The banning of the guns could work only in isolated Japan, where there were no neighbors as a threat, and where there were no neighbors from whom to reacquire the technology.

So these stories of isolated societies illustrate two general principles about relations between human group size and innovation or creativity. First, in any society except a totally isolated society, most innovations come in from the outside, rather than being conceived within that society. And secondly, any society undergoes local fads. By fads I mean a custom that does not make economic sense. Societies either adopt practices that are not profitable or for whatever reasons abandon practices that are profitable. But usually those fads are reversed, as a result of the societies next door without the fads out-competing the society with the fad, or else as a result of the society with the fad, like those European princes who gave up the guns, realizing they’re making a big mistake and reacquiring the fad. In short, competition between human societies that are in contact with each other is what drives the invention of new technology and the continued availability of technology. Only in an isolated society, where there’s no competition and no source of reintroduction, can one of these fads result in the permanent loss of a valuable technology. So that’s one of the two sets of lessons that I want to draw from history, about what happens in a really isolated society and group.

The other lesson that I would like to draw from history concerns what is called the optimal fragmentation principle. Namely, if you’ve got a human group, whether the human group is the staff of this museum, or your business, or the German beer industry, or Route 128, is that group best organized as a single large unit, or is it best organized as a number of small units, or is it best fragmented into a lot of small units? What’s the most effective organization of the groups?

I propose to get some empirical information about this question by comparing the histories of China and Europe. Why is it that China in the Renaissance fell behind Europe in technology? Often people assume that it has something to do with the Confucian tradition in China supposedly making the Chinese ultra-conservative, whereas the Judeo-Christian tradition in Europe supposedly stimulated science and innovation. Well, first of all, just ask Galileo about the simulating effects of the Judeo-Christian tradition on science. Then, secondly, just consider the state of technology in medieval Confucian China. China led the world in innovation and technology in the early Renaissance. Chinese inventions include canal lock gates, cast iron, compasses, deep drilling, gun powder, kites, paper, porcelain, printing, stern-post rudders, and wheelbarrows – all of those innovations are Chinese innovations. So the real question is, why did Renaissance China lose its enormous technological lead to late-starter Europe?

We can get insight by seeing why China lost its lead in ocean-going ships. As of the year 1400, China had by far the best, the biggest, and the largest number of, ocean-going ships in the world. Between 1405 and 1432 the Chinese sent 7 ocean-going fleets, the so-called treasure fleets, out from China. Those fleets comprised hundreds of ships; they had total crews of 20,000 men; each of those ships dwarfed the tiny ships of Columbus; and those gigantic fleets sailed from China to Indonesia, to India, to Arabia, to the east coast of Africa, and down the east coast of Africa. It looked as if the Chinese were on the verge of rounding the Cape of Good Hope, coming up the west side of Africa, and colonizing Europe.

Well, China’s tremendous fleets came to an end through a typical episode of isolationism, such as one finds in the histories of many countries. There was a new emperor in China in 1432. In China there had been a Navy faction and an anti-Navy faction. In 1432, with the new emperor, the anti-Navy faction gained ascendancy. The new emperor decided that spending all this money on ships is a waste of money. Okay, there’s nothing unusual about that in China; there was also isolationism in the United States in the 1930′s, and Britain did not want anything to do with electric lighting until the 1920s. The difference, though, is that this abandoning of fleets in China was final, because China was unified under one emperor. When that one emperor gave the order to dismantle the shipyards and stop sending out the ships, that order applied to all of China, and China’s tradition of building ocean-going ships was lost because of the decision by one person. China was a virtual gigantic island, like Tasmania.

Now contrast that with what happened with ocean-going fleets in Europe. Columbus was an Italian, and he wanted an ocean-going fleet to sail across the Atlantic. Everybody in Italy considered this a stupid idea and wouldn’t support it. So Columbus went to the next country, France, where everybody considered it a stupid idea and wouldn’t support it. So Columbus went to Portugal, where the king of Portugal considered it a stupid idea and wouldn’t support it. So Columbus went across the border to a duke of Spain who considered this stupid. And Columbus then went to another duke of Spain who also considered it a waste of money. On his sixth try Columbus went to the king and queen of Spain, who said this is stupid. Finally, on the seventh try, Columbus went back to the king and queen of Spain, who said, all right, you can have three ships, but they were small ships. Columbus sailed across the Atlantic and, as we all know, discovered the New World, came back, and brought the news to Europe. Cortez and Pizarro followed him and brought back huge quantities of wealth. Within a short time, as a result of Columbus having shown the way, 11 European countries jumped into the colonial game and got into fierce competition with each other. The essence of these events is that Europe was fragmented, so Columbus had many different chances.

Essentially the same thing happened in China with clocks: one emperor’s decision abolished clocks over China. China was also on the verge of building powerful water-powered machinery before the Industrial Revolution in Britain, but the emperor said “Stop,” and so that was the end of the water-powered machinery in China. In contrast, in Europe there were princes who said no to electric lighting, or to printing, or to guns. And, yes, in certain principalities for a while printing was suppressed. But because Europe in the Renaissance was divided among 2,000 principalities, it was never the case that there was one idiot in command of all Europe who could abolish a whole technology. Inventors had lots of chances, there was always competition between different states, and when one state tried something out that proved valuable, the other states saw the opportunity and adopted it. So the real question is, why was China chronically unified, and why was Europe chronically disunified? Why is Europe disunified to this day?

The answer is geography. Just picture a map of China and a map of Europe. China has a smooth coastline. Europe has an indented coastline, and each big indentation is a peninsula that became an independent country, independent ethnic group, and independent experiment in building a society: notably, the Greek peninsula, Italy, the Iberian peninsula, Denmark, and Norway/Sweden. Europe had two big islands that became important independent societies, Britain and Ireland, while China had no island big enough to become an independent society until the modern emergence of Taiwan. Europe is transected by mountain ranges that split up Europe into different principalities: the Alps, the Pyrenees, Carpathians – China does not have mountain ranges that transect China. In Europe big rivers flow radially – the Rhine, the Rhone, the Danube, and the Elbe – and they don’t unify Europe. In China the two big rivers flow parallel to each other, are separated by low-lying land, and were quickly connected by canals. For those geographic reasons, China was unified in 221 B.C. and has stayed unified most of the time since then, whereas for geographic reasons Europe was never unified. Augustus couldn’t do it, Charlemagne couldn’t do it, and Napoleon and Hitler couldn’t unify Europe. To this day, the Europe Union is having difficulties bringing any unity to Europe.

So, the lesson I draw is that competition between entities that have free communication between them spurred on Europe. In China one despot could and did halt innovation in China. Instead, China’s experience of technological innovation came during the times when China’s unity fell apart, or when China was taken over temporarily by an outside invader.

You’ve seen that effect even in modern times. Twenty years ago, a few idiots in control of the world’s most populous nation were able to shut down the educational system for one billion people at the time of the Great Cultural Revolution, whereas it’s impossible for a few idiots to shut down the educational system of all of Europe. This suggests, then, that Europe’s fragmentation was a great advantage to Europe as far as technological and scientific innovation is concerned. Does this mean that a high degree of fragmentation is even better? Probably not. India was geographically even more fragmented than Europe, but India was not technologically as innovative as Europe. And this suggests that there is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage. Instead, innovation proceeds most rapidly in a society with some intermediate degree of fragmentation.

Okay, let’s now start to apply all this to what we should do if we want to try to go out and get rich. Let’s apply this to some affluent modern industries and companies. I’ll give you two examples. The first example concerns that image of productivity that we Americans have as we look toward Japan. We fantasize that the industrial productivity of Japan and Germany is greater than that of the United States. And that’s not true. On the average, American industrial productivity is higher than the industrial productivity of either Japan or Germany. But that average figure conceals differences among the industries of the same country, related to differences in organization – and those differences are very instructive. Let me give you two examples from case studies carried out by the McKinsey Corporation, an economics study industry based in Washington. These two examples involve the German beer industry and the Japanese food-processing industry.

What about the German beer industry? Well, the Germans are very efficient in some of their industries. The German metal-working industry and the German steel industry are equal in productivity to those of the United States, but the German beer-producing industry has a productivity only 43% that of the United States. And it’s not that the Germans make bad beer; the Germans make wonderful beer. Whenever my wife and I go to Germany, we take along an extra suitcase specifically for the purpose of filling it up with bottles of German beer, which we take back and dole out to ourselves for the year after each of our trips to Germany. Why, then, since the Germans make such great beer, and since their industrial organization works so successfully for steel and metal, can’t they achieve a successful industrial organization for beer?

It turns out that the German beer industry suffers from small-scale production. There are 1,000 little local beer companies in Germany, shielded from competition with each other because each German brewery has virtually a local monopoly, and shielded from competition with imports. The United States has 67 major beer breweries, producing 23 billion liters of beer per year. Germany has 1,000 major beer breweries, producing only half as much beer per year as the United States. That’s to say that the average brewery in the U.S. produces 31 times more beer than the average brewery in Germany.

That fact results from German local tastes and German government policies. German beer drinkers are fiercely loyal to their local brand of beer. And so there is no national brand of beer in Germany, analogous to Budweiser or Miller or Coors in the United States. Instead, most German beer is consumed within 30 miles of the place where it is brewed. And any of you who have been in Germany know that Germans love their local beer and loathe the beer that comes from next door. The result is that the German beer industry cannot profit from economies of scale. In the beer industry, as in other industries, production costs decrease greatly with size. The bigger the refrigerator unit for making the beer, and the longer the bottle-filling line, the cheaper is the cost of brewing beer. So these tiny German beer industries are relatively inefficient. There’s no competition; there are just 1,000 local monopolies.

That outcome, of Germans having their local beer loyalties, is reinforced by German government law. The German government makes it hard for foreign beers to compete on the German market. The German government has so-called beer purity laws. The German government specifies exactly what can go into beer, and not surprisingly what can go into beer is what German breweries put into beer, and it’s not what American, French, and Swedish breweries like to put into beer. So it’s difficult for foreign breweries to compete on the German beer market. The result is that German beer is not exported very much. Any of you who like to buy Lowenbrau in the U.S. should look at the label in the supermarket: your U.S.-bought Lowenbrau is not brewed in Germany, it’s brewed on license in the United States with American productivity and American efficiencies of scale.

The same inefficiency turns out to characterize some other German industries. The German soap industry and the German consumer electronics industry are also inefficient; their companies are not exposed to competition with each other, nor are they exposed to foreign competition, and so they do not acquire the best practices of international industry. But that disadvantage is not true for the German metal-producing industry or steel industry. There, big German companies compete with each other and they compete internationally, and therefore they are forced to acquire best international practices through competition.

There you have an example from the German beer industry about the disadvantages of having lots of small groups that are secretive and don’t compete with each other. The other example that I want to tell you about is the Japanese food-processing industry. I mentioned that we Americans are virtually paranoid about the efficiency of the Japanese, and it’s true for some Japanese industries, but not for their food-processing industry. Japanese processed food is produced with an efficiency 32% of American processed foods. There are 67,000 food processing companies in Japan; there are only 21,000 in the United States, although the U.S. has double Japan’s population, so the average food-processing company in the United States is six times bigger than its Japanese counterpart. What is the reason why the Japanese food-processing industry, like German beer industries, consists of small companies with local monopolies?

It turns out to be basically the same two reasons as with German beer: namely, local tastes creating local monopolies, and government policies. The Japanese are fanatics for fresh foods. Any of you who have been to Japan, as my wife and I were in October, will remember what it says on Japanese containers. In the United States, when you go to the supermarket, there’s one date on the container, the date by which you’re supposed to throw away that bottle of milk. In Japan there are three dates on the container: there’s the date when the milk was manufactured, and there’s the date when the milk arrived at the supermarket, and then there’s the date when the milk should be thrown away, and these dates are in big letters; the Japanese really care about the dates. So the result is that milk production in Japan always starts at one minute past midnight, so that the milk that goes to market that morning is today’s milk. If milk had been produced at 11:59 p.m., the milk company would have to stamp on its container that this milk was made yesterday, and no Japanese person would buy it. The result is again that Japanese food-processing industries enjoy local monopolies. Obviously, a milk producer up in Hokkaido, northern Japan, is not going to be able to compete in Kyushu, in southern Japan, with a Kyushu producer, because of the several days in transit from Hokkaido. By the time a carton arrives in Kyushu, the people will read on the container that this milk is three days old, and no Japanese person would buy it.

So that’s one thing that creates local monopolies for food production in Japan: Japanese fanaticism about really fresh food. And the second thing is Japanese government policy, which reinforces these local monopolies. The Japanese government obstructs the import of foreign processed food by slapping on a ten-day quarantine. And because the Japanese care about food that was produced that very day, naturally by the time that American beef, chicken, or whatever arrives at the supermarket and the date says ten days old, the Japanese are not very enthusiastic about buying those American products. And there are other restrictions that the Japanese government imposes on foreign imports.

The result is that Japanese food-processing industries are not exposed to domestic competition, they’re all local monopolies, they’re not exposed to foreign competition, and they don’t learn the best methods in the international trade for producing food. And the result is that, in Japan, Japanese beef costs $200 a pound. My wife and I had heard about that before we went to Japan, but what we did not realize until we were brought into a supermarket by my wife’s Japanese cousin is that chicken in Japan costs $25 a pound. The reason the Japanese can get away with that is that Japanese chicken producers are not exposed to competition with super-efficient American chicken producers.

Now all those features are not true for some other Japanese industries. The Japanese steel industry, the Japanese metal industry, the Japanese car industry, their car-part industry, and their electronic industries have productivities greater than our American counterparts. But the Japanese soap industry, and the Japanese beer industry, and the Japanese computer industry, like the Japanese food-processing industry, are not exposed to competition, do not apply the best practices, and so have ended up with productivities below those of corresponding industries in the United States.

Now let’s finally apply these lessons to comparing different industries or industrial belts within the United States. I mentioned that when I was growing up, Route 128 outside of Boston led the world in productivity for an industrial belt, but Route 128 has now fallen behind Silicon Valley. Since my book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” was published, I’ve spent a lot of time talking with people from Silicon Valley and some from Route 128, and they tell me that the corporate ethos in these two industrial belts is quite different. Silicon Valley consists of lots of companies that are fiercely competitive with each other, but nevertheless there’s a lot of collaboration, and despite the competition there is a free flow of ideas and a free flow of people and a free flow of information between these companies that compete with each other. In contrast, I’m told that the business of Route 128 are much more secretive, and insulated from each other like Japanese milk-producing companies.

Or again, what about the contrast between Microsoft and IBM? Again, since my book was published, I’ve acquired friends at Microsoft, and I’ve learned about Microsoft’s organization, which is quite distinctive. Microsoft has lots of units, with free communication between units, and each of those units may have five to ten people working in them, but the units are not micro-managed, they are allowed a great deal of freedom in pursuing their own ideas. That unusual organization at Microsoft, broken up in to a lot of semi-independent units competing within the same company, contrasts with the organization at IBM, which until four years ago had much more insulated groups. A month ago, when I was talking in the industrial belt of North Carolina, the Raleigh-Durham area industrial belt, I met someone who is on the board of directors of IBM, and that person told me, Jared, what you say about IBM was quite true until four years ago: IBM did have this secretive organization which resulted in IBM’s loss of competitive ability, but then IBM acquired a new CEO who changed things drastically, and IBM now has a more Microsoft-like organization, and you can see it, I’m told, in the improvement in IBM’s innovativeness.

So what this suggests is that we can extract from human history a couple of principles. First, the principle that really isolated groups are at a disadvantage, because most groups get most of their ideas and innovations from the outside. Second, I also derive the principle of intermediate fragmentation: you don’t want excessive unity and you don’t want excessive fragmentation; instead, you want your human society or business to be broken up into a number of groups which compete with each other but which also maintain relatively free communication with each other. And those I see as the overall principles of how to organize a business and get rich.

But, let me conclude by emphasizing some obvious restrictions. I’m sure all of you are already thinking to yourselves, “But, but, but, he’s forgot – but but but….”– Yes, let’s go back to those but-but-buts. One restriction is, I mentioned at the beginning, “all other things being equal”. Obviously the best organization is not going to help with an idiot as a CEO, and the success of Microsoft certainly depends, at least in part, on the unusual qualities of Bill Gates, as well as on the unusual organization of Microsoft.

In addition, I’ve been talking about conditions to maximize productivity and creativity and moneymaking ability. There are other considerations in organized human groups, and there are conditions under which productivity is not the thing you’re most interested in. There are conditions where more centralization may be appropriate. For example, during a war, you do not want your air force, army, and navy to be fiercely competing with each other, but instead you want during a war more centralized control than you do in peace time. And there are also human groups for which productivity and differential money-making ability are not the overriding consideration. I don’t want you to go home tonight and each of you to say to your spouse or significant other, “Darling, I’ve just heard this guy Jared Diamond, who says that within human groups competition is what spurs productivity and innovation, and so I think we need to follow his advice in our household. For the next month let’s see which of us earns a bigger income, and at the end of the month the bigger income-producer will keep on with the job, and the one of us who has lower income and is less efficient can turn to scrubbing the floors and shopping at the supermarkets.” That just illustrates: there are other considerations in a marriage than optimizing productivity.

Again, I don’t want you to go home to your several children, and say, “Sweetie-pies, I heard this talk today by this guy Jared Diamond who enunciated some principles that I think would be really good for rearing children. We’re going to see what your grades are at mid-term, and based on those grades, whichever one of you comes closer to getting all A’s, that one we will support to the hilt, private schools, college, whatever you need, whereas those of you who get poor grades can start jobs as a shoe-shine boy or girl” – No! In a family, and in some other human groups, productivity is not the appropriate consideration for judging the best organization of the group.

Nevertheless there are some human groups where productivity is indeed a significant consideration. And that certainly includes businesses, industrial belts, and to a considerable degree, countries. In order to understand how to organize these businesses, we could perform natural experiments. We could set up, if we were rich enough, a hundred businesses, organized a hundred different ways, see which businesses went bankrupt, and after 20 years figure that we now have the correct industrial organization. But that’s an inefficient way to do it. We can instead learn from the comparative approach, by looking to natural experiments of history. I hope that some of you will be able to apply these lessons to acquiring the wealth that has so far eluded me.

My answer to Jared Diamond’s question: What is the best way to organize human groups and human organizations and businesses so as to maximize productivity, creativity, innovation, and wealth?

In a word, Ortegrity!

I am currently working my way through the Understanding in Time reading list selected by Don Steehler to aid his fellow humans in coping with our present human crisis. The following article is by one of his recommended authors. It is reposted from the January 2002 edition of The Nation.

Beyond Jihad Vs. McWorld

Benjamin R. Barber

The terrorist attacks of September 11 did without a doubt change the world forever, but they failed to change the ideological viewpoint of either the left or the right in any significant way. The warriors and unilateralists of the right still insist war conducted by an ever-sovereign America is the only appropriate response to terrorism, while the left continues to talk about the need for internationalism, interdependency and an approach to global markets that redresses economic imbalances and thereby reduces the appeal of extremism–if, in the climate of war patriotism, it talks a little more quietly than heretofore. The internationalist lobby has a right to grow more vociferous, however, for what has changed in the wake of September 11 is the relationship between these arguments and political realism (and its contrary, political idealism). Prior to September 11, realpolitik (though it could speak with progressive accents, as it did with Ronald Steel and E.H. Carr before him)! belonged primarily to the right–which spurned talk of human rights and democracy as hopelessly utopian, the blather of romantic left-wing idealists who preferred to see the world as they wished it to be rather than as it actually was.

Following September 11, however, the realist tiger changed its stripes: “Idealistic” internationalism has become the new realism. We face not a paradigm shift but the occupation of an old paradigm by new tenants. Democratic globalists are quite abruptly the new realists while the old realism–especially in its embrace of markets–looks increasingly like a dangerous and utterly unrealistic dogma opaque to our new realities as brutally inscribed on the national consciousness by the demonic architects of September 11. The issue is not whether to pursue a military or a civic strategy, for both are clearly needed; the issue is how to pursue either one.

The historical realist doctrine was firmly grounded in an international politics of sovereign states pursuing their interests in a setting of shifting alliances where principles could only obstruct the achievement of sovereign ends that interests alone defined and served. Its mantras–the clichÈs of Lord Acton, Henry Morgenthau, George Kennan or, for that matter, Henry Kissinger–had it that nations have neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies but only permanent interests; that the enemies of our enemies are always our friends; that the pursuit of democratic ideals or human rights can often obfuscate our true interests; that coalitions and alliances in war or peace are tolerable only to the degree that we retain our sovereign independence in all critical decisions and policies; and that international institutions are to be embraced, ignored or discarded exclusively on the basis of how well they serve our sovereign national interests, which are entirely separable! from the objectives of such institutions.

However appealing these mantras may seem, and though upon occasion they served to counter the hypocritical use of democratic arguments to disguise interests (as when true democrats attacked Woodrow Wilson’s war to make the world “safe for democracy”), they can no longer be said to represent even a plausible, let alone a realistic, strategy in our current circumstances. To understand why, we need to understand how September 11 put a period once and for all at the end of the old story of American independence.

Many would say the two great world wars of the past century, even as they proved American power and resilience, were already distinct if unheeded harbingers of the passing of our sovereignty; for, though fought on foreign soil, they represented conflicts from which America could not be protected by its two oceans, struggles whose outcomes would affect an America linked to the then-nascent global system. Did anyone imagine that America could be indifferent to the victory of fascism in Europe or Japanese imperialism in Asia (or, later, of Soviet Communism in Eurasia) as it might once have been indifferent to the triumph of the British or Belgian or French empires in Africa? By the end of the twentieth century, irresistible interdependence was a leitmotif of every ecological, technological and economic event. It could hardly escape even casual observers that global warming recognizes no sovereign territory, that AIDS carries no passport, that technology renders national boundarie! s increasingly meaningless, that the Internet defies national regulation, that oil and cocaine addiction circle the planet like twin plagues and that financial capital and labor resources, like their anarchic cousins crime and terror, move from country to country with “wilding” abandon without regard for formal or legal arrangements–acting informally and illegally whenever traditional institutions stand in their way.

Most nations understood the significance of these changes well enough, and well before the end of the past century Europe was already on the way to forging transnational forms of integration that rendered its member nations’ sovereignty dubious. Not the United States. Wrapped in its national myths of splendid isolation and blessed innocence (chronicled insightfully by Herman Melville and Henry James), it held out. How easy it was, encircled by two oceans and reinforced lately in its belief in sovereign invincibility by the novel utopia of a missile shield–technology construed as a virtual ocean to protect us from the world’s turmoil and dangers–to persist in the illusion of sovereignty. The good times of the 1990s facilitated an easy acquiescence in the founding myths, for in that (suddenly remote) era of prideful narcissism, other people’s troubles and the depredations that were the collateral damage of America’s prosperous and productive global markets seemed little more t! han diverting melodramas on CNN’s evening “news” soap operas.

Then came September 11. Marauders from the sky, from above and abroad but also from within and below, sleepers in our midst who somehow were leveraging our own powers of technology to overcome our might, made a mockery of our sovereignty, demonstrating that there was no longer any difference between inside and outside, between domestic and international. We still don’t know authoritatively who precisely sponsored the acts of September 11 or the bioterror that followed it: What alone has become clear is that we can no longer assign culpability in the neat nineteenth-century terms of domestic and foreign. And while we may still seek sovereign sponsors for acts of terror that have none, the myth of our independence can no longer be sustained. Nonstate actors, whether they are multinational corporations or loosely knit terrorist cells, are neither domestic nor foreign, neither national nor international, neither sovereign entities nor international organizations. Going on about st! ates that harbor terrorists (our “allies” Egypt and Saudi Arabia? Our good friend Germany? Or how about Florida and New Jersey?) simply isn’t helpful in catching the bad guys. The Taliban are gone, and bin Laden will no doubt follow, but terrorism’s network exists in anonymous cells we can neither identify nor capture. Declaring our independence in a world of perverse and malevolent interdependence foisted on us by people who despise us comes close to what political science roughnecks once would have called pissing into the wind. Pakistan and Saudi Arabia still foster schools that teach hate, and suicide bombers are still lining up in Palestine for martyrdom missions in numbers that suggest an open call for a Broadway show.

The American myth of independence is not the only casualty of September 11. Traditional realist paradigms fail us today also because our adversaries are no longer motivated by “interest” in any relevant sense, and this makes the appeal to interest in the fashion of realpolitik and rational-choice theory seem merely foolish. Markets may be transnational instruments of interests, and even bin Laden has a kind of “list of demands” (American troops out of Saudi Arabia, Palestine liberated from Israeli “occupation,” down with the infidel empire), but terrorists are not stubborn negotiators pursuing rational agendas. Their souls yearn for other days when certainty was unencumbered, for other worlds where paradise offered other rewards. Their fanaticism has causes and their zeal has its reasons, but market conceptions of interest will not succeed in fathoming them. Bombing Hanoi never brought the Vietcong to their knees, and they were only passionate nationalists, not messianic funda! mentalists; do we think we can bomb into submission the millions who resent, fear and sometimes detest what they think America means?

Or take the realist epigram about nations having neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies. It actually turns out that America’s friends, defined not by interests but by principles, are its best allies and most reliable coalition partners in the war on terrorism. Even conservative realists have acknowledged that Israel–whatever one thinks of Sharon’s policies–is a formidable ally in part because it is the sole democracy in the Middle East. By the same token, we have been consistently betrayed by an odd assortment of allies born of shifting alliances that have been forged and broken in pursuit of “friendship” with the enemies of our enemies: Iraq, Iran and those onetime allies of convenience in the war against the Soviets, the Taliban. Then there are the countless Islamic tyrannies that are on our side only because their enemies have in turn been the enemies of American economic interests or threats to the flow of oil. I will leave it to others to determine how prudent ! our realist logic is in embracing Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Yemen or Pakistan, whose official media and state-sponsored schools often promulgate the very propaganda and lies we have joined with them to combat.

On the other hand, the key principles at stake–democracy and pluralism, a space for religion safe from state and commercial interference, and a space for government safe from sectarianism and the ambitions of theocrats–actually turn out to be prudent and useful benchmarks for collecting allies who will stand with us in the war on terrorism. In the new post-September 11 realism, it is apparent that the only true friends we have are the democracies, and they are friends because they are democracies and share our values even when they contest our interests and are made anxious by our power. In the war against terror or the war for freedom, what true realist would trade a cantankerous, preternaturally anti-American France for a diplomatic and ostentatiously pro-American Saudi Arabia?

Yet the pursuit of democracy has been a sideline in an American realist foreign policy organized around oil and trade with despots pretending to be on our side–not just in Republican but in Democratic administrations as well, where democracy was proclaimed but (remember Larry Summers) market democracy construed as market fundamentalism was practiced. In the old paradigm, democratic norms were very nice as emblems of abstract belief and utopian aspiration, or as rationalizations of conspicuous interests, but they were poor guides for a country seeking status and safety in the world. Not anymore. The cute clichÈ about democracies not making war on one another is suddenly a hard realist foundational principle for national security policy.

Except the truth today is not only that democracies do not make war on one another, but that democracies alone are secure from collective forms of violence and reactionary fundamentalism, whether religious or ethnic. Those Islamic nations (or nations with large Islamic populations) that have made progress toward democracy–Bangladesh, India or Turkey, for example–have been relatively free of systematic terrorism and reactionary fundamentalism as well as the export of terrorism. They may still persecute minorities, harbor racists and reflect democratic aspirations only partially, but they do not teach hate in their schools or pipe propaganda through an official press or fund terrorist training camps. Like India recently, they are the victims rather than the perpetrators of international terrorism. Making allies of the enemies of democracy because they share putative interests with us is, in other words, not realism but foolish self-deception. We have learned from the military ! campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda how, when push comes to shove (push has come to shove!), the Egyptians and the Saudis can be unreliable in sharing intelligence, interdicting the funding of terrorism or standing firm against the terrorists at their own door. Pakistan still allows thousands of fundamentalist madrassahs to operate as holy-war training schools. Yet how can these “allies” possibly be tough when, in defense of their despotic regimes, they think that coddling the terrorists outside their doors may be the price they have to pay for keeping at bay the terrorists already in their front parlors? The issue is not religion, not even fundamentalism; the issue is democracy.

Unilateralism rooted in a keen sense of the integrity of sovereign autonomy has been another keynote of realism’s American trajectory and is likely to become another casualty of September 11. From the Monroe Doctrine to our refusal to join the League of Nations, from the isolationism that preceded World War II, and from which we were jarred only by Pearl Harbor, to the isolationism that followed the war and that yielded only partially to the cold war and the arms race, and from our reluctance to pay our UN dues or sign on to international treaties to our refusal to place American troops under the command of friendly NATO foreigners, the United States has persisted in reducing foreign policy to a singular formula that preaches going it alone. Despite the humiliations of the 1970s, when oil shortages, emerging ecological movements and the Iranian hostage crisis should have warned us of the limitations of unilateralism, we went on playing the Lone Ranger, the banner of sovereign ! independence raised high. We often seem nearly comatose when it comes to the many small injuries and larger incursions to which American sovereignty is subjected on a daily basis by those creeping forms of interdependence that characterize modernity–technology, ecology, trade, pop culture and consumer markets. Only the blunt assault of the suicide bombers awoke the nation to the new realities and the new demands on policy imposed by interdependence. Which is why, since September 11, there has been at least a wan feint in the direction of multilateralism and coalition-building. The long-unpaid UN bills were finally closed out, the Security Council was consulted and some Republican officials even whispered the dreaded Clinton-tainted name of nation-building as a possible requirement in a postwar strategy in Afghanistan. Yet there is a long way to go. While the Colin Powell forces do battle with the Dick Cheney forces for the heart of the President, little is being done to open a civic and political front in the campaign against terrorism. After what seemed a careful multilateral dance with President Putin on missile defense, President Bush has abruptly thrust his ballroom partner aside and waltzed off into the sunset by himself, leaving the Russians and Chinese (and our European allies) to sulk in the encroaching gloom. Even in Afghanistan, Nicholas Kristof, in his first contribution as the New York Times’s new crisis-of-terrorism columnist, complained that even as other nations’ diplomats poured into the capital after its fall, the United States posted not a single representative to Kabul to begin nurturing a postwar political and civil strategy–a reticence it has only just now begun to remedy.

Is there anything realistic about such reluctance? On the contrary, realism here in its new democratic form suggests that America must begin to engage in the slow and sovereignty-eroding business of constructing a cooperative and benevolent interdependence in which it joins the world rather than demanding that the world join it or be consigned to the camp of the terrorists (“You are with us or you are with the terrorists,” intoned the President in those first fearful days after September 11). This work recognizes that while terrorism has no justification, it does have causes. The old realism went by the old adage tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner and eschewed deep explanations of the root causes of violence and terror. The new realism insists that to understand collective malice is not to pardon it but to assure that it can be addressed, interdicted and perhaps even pre-empted. “Bad seed” notions of original sin (“the evil ones”) actually render perpetrators invulnerable–! subject only to a manichean struggle in which the alternative to total victory is total defeat. Calling bin Laden and his associates “the evil ones” is not necessarily inaccurate, but it commits us to a dark world of jihad and counterjihad (what the President first called his crusade), in which issues of democracy, civil comity and social justice–let alone nuance, complexity and interdependence–simply vanish. It is possible to hate jihad without loving America. It is possible to condemn terror as absolutely wrong without thinking that those who are terror’s targets possess absolute right.

This is the premise behind the thesis of interdependence. The context of jihadic resistance and its pathology of terrorism is a complex world in which there are causal interrelationships between the jihadic reaction to modernity and the American role in shaping it according to the peculiar logic of US technology, markets and branded pop culture (what I call McWorld). Determining connections and linkages is not the same thing as distributing blame. Power confers responsibility. The power enjoyed by the United States bestows on it obligations to address conditions it may not have itself brought into being. Jihad in this view may grow out of and reflect (among other things) a pathological metastasis of valid grievances about the effects of an arrogant secularist materialism that is the unfortunate concomitant of the spread of consumerism across the world. It may reflect a desperate and ultimately destructive concern for the integrity of indigenous cultural traditions that are ill! equipped to defend themselves against aggressive markets in a free-trade world. It may reflect a struggle for justice in which Western markets appear as obstacles rather than facilitators of cultural identity.

Can Asian tea, with its religious and family “tea culture,” survive the onslaught of the global merchandising of cola beverages? Can the family sit-down meal survive fast food, with its focus on individualized consumers, fuel-pit-stop eating habits and nourishment construed as snacking? Can national film cultures in Mexico, France or India survive Hollywood’s juggernaut movies geared to universal teen tastes rooted in hard violence and easy sentiment? Where is the space for prayer, for common religious worship or for spiritual and cultural goods in a world in which the 24/7 merchandising of material commodities makes the global economy go round? Are the millions of American Christian families who home-school their children because they are so intimidated by the violent commercial culture awaiting the kids as soon as they leave home nothing but an American Taliban? Do even those secular cosmopolitans in America’s coastal cities want nothing more than the screen diet fed them by! the ubiquitous computers, TVs and multiplexes?

Terror obviously is not an answer, but the truly desperate may settle for terror as a response to our failure even to ask such questions. The issue for jihad’s warriors of annihilation is of course far beyond such anxieties: It entails absolute devotion to absolute values. Yet for many who are appalled by terrorism but unimpressed by America, there may seem to be an absolutist dimension to the materialist aspirations of our markets. Our global market culture appears to us as both voluntary and wholesome; but it can appear to others as both compelling (in the sense of compulsory) and corrupt–not exactly coercive, but capable of seducing children into a willed but corrosive secular materialism. What’s wrong with Disneyland or Nikes or the Whopper? We just “give people what they want.” But this merchandiser’s dream is a form of romanticism, the idealism of neoliberal markets, the convenient idyll that material plenty can satisfy spiritual longing so that fishing for profits can ! be thought of as synonymous with trolling for liberty.

It is the new democratic realist who sees that if the only choice we have is between the mullahs and the mall, between the hegemony of religious absolutism and the hegemony of market determinism, neither liberty nor the human spirit is likely to flourish. As we face up to the costs both of fundamentalist terrorism and of fighting it, must we not ask ourselves how it is that when we see religion colonize every other realm of human life we call it theocracy and turn up our noses at the odor of tyranny; and when we see politics colonize every other realm of human life we call it absolutism and tremble at the prospect of totalitarianism; but when we see market relations and commercial consumerism try to colonize every other realm of human life we call it liberty and celebrate its triumph? There are too many John Walkers who begin by seeking a refuge from the aggressive secularist materialism of their suburban lives and end up slipping into someone else’s dark conspiracy to rid the! earth of materialism’s infidels. If such men are impoverished and without hope as well, they become prime recruits for jihad.

The war on terrorism must be fought, but not as the war of McWorld against jihad. The only war worth winning is the struggle for democracy. What the new realism teaches is that only such a struggle is likely to defeat the radical nihilists. That is good news for progressives. For there are real options for democratic realists in search of civic strategies that address the ills of globalization and the insecurities of the millions of fundamentalist believers who are neither willing consumers of Western commercial culture nor willing advocates of jihadic terror. Well before the calamities of September 11, a significant movement in the direction of constructive and realistic interdependence was discernible, beginning with the Green and human rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s, and continuing into the NGO and “antiglobalization” movements of the past few years. Jubilee 2000 managed to reduce Third World debt-service payments for some nations by up to 30 percent, while the Comm! unity of Democracies initiated by the State Department under Madeleine Albright has been embraced by the Bush Administration and will continue to sponsor meetings of democratic governments and democratic NGOs. International economic reform lobbies like the Millennium Summit’s development goals project, established by the UN to provide responses to global poverty, illiteracy and disease; Inter Action, devoted to increasing foreign aid; Global Leadership, a start-up alliance of corporations and grassroots organizations; and the Zedillo Commission, which calls on the rich countries to devote 0.7 percent of their GNP to development assistance (as compared to an average of 0.2 percent today and under 0.1 percent for the United States), are making serious economic reform an issue for governments. Moreover, and more important, they are insisting with Amartya Sen and his new disciple Jeffrey Sachs that development requires democratization first if it is to succeed.

George Soros’s Open Society Institute and Civicus, the transnational umbrella organization for NGOs, continue to serve the global agenda of civil society. Even corporations are taking an interest: Hundreds are collaborating in a Global Compact, under the aegis of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, to seek a response to issues of global governance, while the World Economic Forum plans to include fifty religious leaders in a summit at its winter meeting in New York in late January.

This is only a start, and without the explicit support of a more multilateralist and civic-minded American government, such institutions are unlikely to change the shape of global relations. Nonetheless, in closing the door on the era of sovereign independence and American security, anarchic terrorism has opened a window for those who believe that social injustice, unregulated wild capitalism and an aggressive secularism that leaves no space for religion and civil society not only create conditions on which terrorism feeds but invite violence in the name of rectification. As a consequence, we are at a seminal moment in our history–one in which trauma opens up the possibility of new forms of action. Yesterday’s utopia is today’s realism; yesterday’s realism, a recipe for catastrophe tomorrow. If ever there was one, this is democracy’s moment. Whether our government seizes it will depend not just on George Bush but on us.

Reposted from New York Times: Opinion.

Hearts and Minds

Nicholas D. Kristof

KUWAIT – With Americans and Iraqis killing each other just north of here and many of my friends at risk, I’ve been pained by some e-mail that has trickled over my laptop computer.

Some of it came from an old Egyptian friend, Ikram Youssef, a Harvard-educated scholar who has a natural empathy for the United States – and since he once lived in Kuwait, a rich understanding that Saddam Hussein is a monster. Yet Professor Youssef hopes that this war will end with an Iraqi victory over America.

“I certainly hope that this campaign will fail,” he declared. And when even a thoughtful internationalist like Professor Youssef is siding with Saddam’s army against America, I want to leap out of my hotel window.

The war that the rest of the world sees is different from the one Americans are viewing. The Pakistani newspaper Awami Awaz exults that “Iraqi leadership has humiliated the Americans.” The Egyptian newspaper Al Wafd titles an editorial “The U.S. Empire of Evil.” Muslim figures who sided with the U.S. after 9/11 and denounced Osama bin Laden are now urging “jihad” against Americans.

Within the U.S. as well, the war has been destructive, further pulverizing the civility of discourse. Each side assumes the other is not just imbecilic but also immoral, when in truth I believe that each side is genuinely high-minded: one is driven by horror of war and the other by horror of Saddam. Neither deserves the sneers of the other. I’m also dispirited today because in some e-mail from fellow doves I detect hints of satisfaction that the U.S. is running into trouble in Iraq – as if hawks should be taught a lesson about the real world with the blood of young Americans.

We doves simply have to let go of the dispute about getting into this war. It’s now a historical question, and the relevant issue, for hawks and doves alike, is how we get out of this war (and how we avoid the next pre-emptive war). Americans should be able to find common ground, for all sides dream of an Iraq that is democratic and an America that is again admired around the world. Creating a postwar Iraq that is free and flourishing is also the one way to recoup the damage this war has already done to America’s image and interests.

Unfortunately, the president’s budget request this week showed little commitment to postwar Iraq. He asked for $62.6 billion for the war and just $2.45 billion for short-term relief and reconstruction, without addressing longer-term needs. Moreover, while the U.S. has been very careful until now to avoid civilian casualties, that emphasis is showing signs of slipping as the war gets tougher.

My intrepid Times colleagues Dexter Filkins and Michael Wilson are with U.S. marines who were in a firefight in which Iraqi fighters hid among women and children. After 10 Americans had been killed, the marines became less meticulous about avoiding civilian casualties.

“It’s not pretty; it’s not surgical,” Chief Warrant Officer Pat Woellhof told them. “You try to limit collateral damage, but they want to fight. Now it’s just smash-mouth football.”

American military officers now say that the policy is to strike Iraqi military targets, if necessary, even when Saddam implants them among schools and apartment blocks, and that the responsibility for the resulting casualties lies with Saddam. Such strikes are understandably tempting now, but they will inflame Iraqi nationalism and make postwar Iraq incomparably more difficult to govern. One of the most depressing windows into this surging nationalism occurred on Wednesday when aid workers handed out food to throngs of hungry Iraqis in a coalition-controlled town called Safwan. Some Iraqis simultaneously jostled for food and chanted, “With our blood, we sacrifice ourselves for you, Saddam.”

The inspiration for our military strategy in Iraq comes from the late Sir Basil Liddell Hart, the great British military expert who urged the approach the U.S. later adopted in its island-hopping advance on Japan in World War II. Washington adopted a similar strategy to move on Baghdad.

But as we implement Sir Basil’s strategy, let’s also adhere to one of his cardinal points about the need to focus on what comes after the war. Since we’re dropping fliers all over Iraq, we might also release leaflets over Washington inscribed with this saying by Sir Basil: “It is essential to conduct war with constant regard to the peace you desire.”

Reposted from YES! A Journal of Postive Futures.

In the future, the Legend of the Great Dying will be recited to the children of the Third Planet:

It happened thusly. First, there was the Great Explosion in human numbers and in technological prowess. In 200 Earth years, all the wild places were degraded or destroyed. Next, the chemicals and gases released by agriculture and industry impaired the health of the surviving species and changed the climate. The Great Heat then occurred, as did the Second Great Flood. Simultaneously, thousands of species of plants and animals were transported across natural barriers and became invasive species in their new surroundings; this was known as the Great Mixing. Near the end of that era, there were many new plagues–the Great Sickness–that ravaged the weakened, unprepared human beings and other species.

Our ancestors learned too late the simple, karmic law of ecology: all is interdependent and all is interconnected. As bad philosophers continued to debate whether human beings were part of nature or its butcher, a spiral of dreadful causation erased this illusory dualism, and it became evident that the destiny of humanity on Earth was to be both victim and executioner of creation. At the end, all earthly beings became joined in an intimate, slow dance of death.

Excerpted from Michael E. Soule´s introduction to Conservation Medicine: Ecological Health in Practice.

Surviving the Great Dying

Michael Lerner

Scientists know with clarity this, our deepest truth. We live in an Age of Extinctions. This is the sixth great spasm of extinctions in the history of our planet. We are driving biodiversity back 65 million years, to its lowest level of vitality since the end of the Age of Dinosaurs. Climate change, ozone depletion, toxic chemicals, habitat destruction, and invasive or infectious species are five of the principal drivers of this Age of Extinctions.

None of this is controversial in conservation biology, the parent discipline of conservation medicine. Less well known are the future possible drivers of extinction. Bill Joy, chief scientist for Sun Microsystems, proposed in his historic Wired magazine article, ìThe Future Does Not Need Us,” that biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics hold the tragic promise of creating unnatural entities that can self-replicate out of control. Nature is already being flooded with genetically modified organisms from agricultural biotechnology. The comparable modification of humanity´s germline draws ever closer. It is conceptually possible that nano-technology and robotics will lead to the creation of unnatural entities capable of self-replication as well. How can we save as much life as possible in this Age of Extinctions? Some so-called conservative commentators scoff at the question. They believe that there is no real threat to life from any technologies other than nuclear, chemical or biological warfare. The enthusiasts of a post-human future, by contrast, quite happily accept the possibility that the future has little need for carbon-based life forms, and actively look forward to the convergence of the computer, the robot, and genetically modified post-humans.

The question of how much of life we can save in this Age of Extinctions has real meaning only for those of us who neither celebrate nor embrace the end of nature. We are, we should recognize, the true conservatives of our time. We are conservative in the root sense that we are dedicated to the conservation of the tried and true ecosystems and life forms of the Earth. We are conservative in that we want our children and their children to be genetically unmodified, to live surrounded by nature in all its glory, and to live lightly and justly on Earth. We, believers in natural law in the deepest sense, regard the question of who and what can be saved in this Age of Extinctions as the greatest religious, philosophical, and practical question of our time.

I believe that the path to saving all that we can of life on Earth–the path to what David Orr calls the Ecological Renaissance–lies with the emerging environmental health movement. I believe, for example, that the right of women to gestate and breast feed their babies toxic free will be one of the great human rights issues of the new millennium. I believe that as the science linking human health to environmental health grows stronger, our experience that our personal health is being affected by the environment will drive the scientific lessons deep into our consciousness. This potent combination of scientific evidence and direct personal experience of wounds inflicted upon us and those we love by a degraded environment will, I believe, energize the emerging environmental health movement making it into a global force.

Take chemicals and health as an example. There is growing evidence that there are over 100 diseases and conditions of our time in which chemical exposures either do or may well play a contributing role. The list includes asthma, allergies, autism, many cancers, learning disabilities, endometriosis, infertility, Parkinson´s disease, and much more. Scientists are beginning to understand that all human beings on Earth carry hundreds of persistent bioaccumulative toxins in their bodies (chemicals that stay in our bodies over time), some at levels that are associated in animal studies with diseases similar to those that are endemic in the human population. Similarly, scientists have begun to establish that low levels of these chemicals in our bodies, once thought to be safe, can have significant health effects.

Let me speak of my own family´s experience. In my family, learning disabilities are common, both of my parents have had cancer, one of my half-sisters died in her 20s of cancer, there are four family members on the autistic spectrum, and none of the children born to me and my brothers would be alive today without intensive medical intervention at conception or birth. While we cannot know the causation of any of these conditions with certainty, all of them may plausibly be linked to exposure to environmental chemicals. One thing I know for certain is that my mother was given DES when she was pregnant with me to prevent miscarriage. If I had been a girl, I would have had a high risk of reproductive tract cancer. DES is a potent endocrine-disrupting chemical.

Likewise, climate change is ever more powerfully and rapidly entering collective consciousness, not as an abstraction but as a direct threat to our health, our welfare, and the economies that sustain us. Changing vectors of infectious disease like West Nile Virus, droughts that are killing crops, glacial melts that are destroying drinking water sources–these are no longer distant abstractions but increasingly direct realities.

The impact of poverty on health is an over-whelming reality, especially in developing countries. But even in the United States the power of this issue is rapidly increasing. Again, scientific data on ìdisparities in health outcomes” increasingly demonstrates that income disparities are one of the most powerful of all predictors of public health, with countries that promote greater equity enjoying better health and countries with a growing divide between rich and poor–such as the United States–suffering from worse public health. As a practical matter, greater equity promotes better health everywhere in the world, and the consciousness that promotes equity also tends to preserve the environment. It is the consciousness of the interdependence of all life.

The environmental health movement both differs from and shares much with the environmental movement. Many analysts of the environmental movement now recognize that this great shift in global consciousness, for all its accomplishments, has largely failed to connect its passionate advocacy for nature with the immediate concern of most people living in an increasingly urban world: the preservation of their own health. Yet the truth is that human health, animal health, and ecosystem health are inextricably connected.

Millions of people around the world intuitively share this apprehension of the essential unity of life. The great Buddhist poet Thich Nhat Hanh calls this the consciousness of InterBeing. It is a venerable consciousness shared by many indigenous peoples, an ancient knowing that has been driven to the periphery of modern consciousness by industrial interests, the specialization and fragmentation of the scientific enterprise, corporate control of the global media, and other forces. But InterBeing is a way of knowing the world that is ineluctably returning to the center of post-post modern discourse. The Law of InterBeing is, as Michael Soule says so beautifully, ìthe simple, karmic law of ecology: all is interdependent and all is interconnected.

The emerging environmental health movement is the prose that is putting the poetry of InterBeing into practice. When breast cancer patients, women with endometriosis, mothers of children with asthma and birth defects, and representatives of dozens of other disease tribes begin to recognize their shared interest in reducing chemical contaminants in the environment, they form a potent new social force. When they are joined by the physicians, nurses, and other health professionals who care about them, their power is further amplified.

Like the civil rights movement, the emerging environmental health movement is a complex social phenomenon. It brings together, in often uneasy alliance, many groups with different primary concerns. Patient groups, for example, are first concerned with service delivery and the search for a cure. But as they begin to recognize that environmental factors are either a known or highly suspected contributor to the disease they share, their concern with prevention begins to rise.

Since patient groups are at the heart of the emerging environmental health movement, women are destined to play a central role in its leadership. Public opinion research confirms that women are much more likely to care about threats to the health of their families than men.

Environmental justice advocates have long under-stood that the incinerators, toxic waste dumps, and chemical plants across the street are making them sick. So do occupational health scientists who work with trade unions. Environmental groups, by contrast, may have as a primary concern what is happening to wildlife and ecosystems. But they are beginning to recognize the power of joining forces with patient groups, health professionals, scientists, environmental justice groups, occupational health advocates, religious groups and others with a shared concern for environmental health.

This is not the place to discuss at length the organizing principles of the emerging environmental health movement. It would take too long to describe how grass-roots based, market-focused campaigns with the real power to change corporate behavior in the market place have become the new tool of many groups working for environmental health goals. People have discovered their power in the marketplace, even when legislatures, the courts, and executive branch have become dominated by special interests. Corporate brands contain much of the value of global corporations, hence they remain fundamentally vulnerable to grassroots-based, market-focused protest campaigns. These market campaigns cannot resolve the fundamental question of how an ecological society should be organized. But they do represent one of the instruments for peaceful change of our time.

Human health is the common language of those who would disagree on everything else. We may or may not care about spotted owls, or about the struggles of low-income Americans, or about famines in Africa. But we all–progressives, libertarians, and conservatives–care about whether we and those we love are healthy or sick.

A teachable moment For those who think the dream of a just and sustainable future is a utopian fantasy, it is worth remembering the history of the last 250 years in its positive as well as its many negative aspects. In this extraordinarily brief period of time, countries around the world established democracies as their dominant form of government, brought to an end slavery as a norm that had been accepted for millennia, recognized the rights of women and organized labor, and extended legal rights to prisoners, to the mentally ill, and to children. Many of us have seen in our own lifetimes the power of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the gay rights movement, and many other movements of consciousness. What all these movements have in common is the gradual extension of respectful awareness of what we share with other people and with other life forms.

How do we summon the collective will to make this great transition in consciousness and technology when the forces opposed to it dominate every sector of the global system? Twenty years of work with people with cancer have taught me that when we face our mortality, we enter one of the great teachable moments of our lives. It is in the contemplation of our mortality that we often begin truly to live from our deepest consciousness.

I believe that as recognition of the reality of this Age of Extinctions enters human consciousness, we may collectively enter into a teachable moment in the evolution of human consciousness. As our collective consciousness deepens, we may begin to discover the collective will to bring the global system back to the principles of living in harmony with nature.

We know the hour is late. Much of our inheritance of life has already been destroyed. Far more will be heedlessly squandered before we have any hope of consolidating an ecological renaissance. We also know that we may not succeed. The forces of destruction may overwhelm our bravest efforts. But the question of whether we will succeed is not the deepest question for us. The question we must ask ourselves is how we choose to live during this Age of Extinctions. What do we tell our children? What do we tell ourselves?

My friend Rachel Remen once asked the great philosopher Gregory Bateson who he was. ìI am,” Bateson said, ìa friend of evolution.” Bateson was a friend not only of genetic evolution but equally of the evolution of consciousness. I believe that the way to live in this Age of Extinctions is to find for ourselves that core of meaning that has always been essential for people living in dark and difficult times. For some that core of meaning is religious or spiritual, for others it centers on family and friends, while for others it is found in nature or music or art or service to others.

My most fundamental hope is that as we come to recognize the reality that we are living in an Age of Extinctions, we as a species will find the core of meaning that helps each of us move through this dark collective night of the soul. My hope is that the individual and collective searches for meaning will begin to form a larger pattern. I believe that the emerging environmental health movement symbolizes this movement toward shared meaning. A line in a James Taylor song says:

ìLet us recognize that we are bound together
All men and women, Living on this Earth
By our desire to see the world become a place
Where our children can grow free and strong.”

I believe it is the recognition of the truth of those words that may bring us through.

Mr. Stefan Mittman forwarded me this link. It is reposted from Common Dreams.

Why I Quit

John Brady Kiesling

Dear Mr. Secretary, I am writing you to submit my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States and from my position as Political Counselor in U.S. Embassy Athens, effective March 7. I do so with a heavy heart. The baggage of my upbringing included a felt obligation to give something back to my country. Service as a U.S. diplomat was a dream job. I was paid to understand foreign languages and cultures, to seek out diplomats, politicians, scholars and journalists, and to persuade them that U.S. interests and theirs fundamentally coincided. My faith in my country and its values was the most powerful weapon in my diplomatic arsenal.

It is inevitable that during twenty years with the State Department I would become more sophisticated and cynical about the narrow and selfish bureaucratic motives that sometimes shaped our policies. Human nature is what it is, and I was rewarded and promoted for understanding human nature. But until this Administration it had been possible to believe that by upholding the policies of my president I was also upholding the interests of the American people and the world. I believe it no longer.

The policies we are now asked to advance are incompatible not only with American values but also with American interests. Our fervent pursuit of war with Iraq is driving us to squander the international legitimacy that has been America´s most potent weapon of both offense and defense since the days of Woodrow Wilson. We have begun to dismantle the largest and most effective web of international relationships the world has ever known. Our current course will bring instability and danger, not security.

The sacrifice of global interests to domestic politics and to bureaucratic self-interest is nothing new, and it is certainly not a uniquely American problem. Still, we have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American opinion, since the war in Vietnam. The September 11 tragedy left us stronger than before, rallying around us a vast international coalition to cooperate for the first time in a systematic way against the threat of terrorism. But rather than take credit for those successes and build on them, this Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 11 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to so to ourselves. Is the Russia of the late Romanovs really our model, a selfish, superstitious empire thrashing toward self-destruction in the name of a doomed status quo?

We should ask ourselves why we have failed to persuade more of the world that a war with Iraq is necessary. We have over the past two years done too much to assert to our world partners that narrow and mercenary U.S. interests override the cherished values of our partners. Even where our aims were not in question, our consistency is at issue. The model of Afghanistan is little comfort to allies wondering on what basis we plan to rebuild the Middle East, and in whose image and interests. Have we indeed become blind, as Russia is blind in Chechnya, as Israel is blind in the Occupied Territories, to our own advice, that overwhelming military power is not the answer to terrorism? After the shambles of post-war Iraq joins the shambles in Grozny and Ramallah, it will be a brave foreigner who forms ranks with Micronesia to follow where we lead.

We have a coalition still, a good one. The loyalty of many of our friends is impressive, a tribute to American moral capital built up over a century. But our closest allies are persuaded less that war is justified than that it would be perilous to allow the U.S. to drift into complete solipsism. Loyalty should be reciprocal. Why does our President condone the swaggering and contemptuous approach to our friends and allies this Administration is fostering, including among its most senior officials. Has ìoderint dum metuant” really become our motto?

I urge you to listen to America´s friends around the world. Even here in Greece, purported hotbed of European anti-Americanism, we have more and closer friends than the American newspaper reader can possibly imagine. Even when they complain about American arrogance, Greeks know that the world is a difficult and dangerous place, and they want a strong international system, with the U.S. and EU in close partnership. When our friends are afraid of us rather than for us, it is time to worry. And now they are afraid. Who will tell them convincingly that the United States is as it was, a beacon of liberty, security, and justice for the planet?

Mr. Secretary, I have enormous respect for your character and ability. You have preserved more international credibility for us than our policy deserves, and salvaged something positive from the excesses of an ideological and self-serving Administration. But your loyalty to the President goes too far. We are straining beyond its limits an international system we built with such toil and treasure, a web of laws, treaties, organizations, and shared values that sets limits on our foes far more effectively than it ever constrained America´s ability to defend its interests.

I am resigning because I have tried and failed to reconcile my conscience with my ability to represent the current U.S. Administration. I have confidence that our democratic process is ultimately self-correcting, and hope that in a small way I can contribute from outside to shaping policies that better serve the security and prosperity of the American people and the world we share.